Today's #LizardReport is a little different because I am on a road trip. Camped out at Kelso Dunes and spent the morning herping in Mojave National Preserve.
7 species of lizard, 4 of them "life lizards"! Here's the first, Phrynosoma platyrhinos, a horned lizard. Look at that camo! They're sooo cute!
(It's intermission at a live theater performance, so I'll post more later or tomorrow in this thread.)
Another "life lizard" from my day #herping near Kelso Dunes, Mojave National Preserve. Long nosed leopard lizard. It sat there letting me photograph it for a while, then got bored and disappeared into a hole.
That was my 200 mm f2.8. I'd have to go back and look at metadata, but it was fairly bright out so I may have upped the iso to 200 and shot it at f5.6, giving a little more depth of field. Part of the trick is having the lizard's body relatively parallel to the front of the camera/lens elements, so most of it is in the focused area. I was also very low to the ground, so that's part of the reason the foreground and background fade so hard. I concentrated on getting its face/eye in focus.
Oh, and, for the record, while I didn't do this, one way to get that extreme deprh of field fall off is to digitally blur the foreground and background in post production. This shot just worked out that way because of the factors I listed above, but a lot of times when you see shots like that, the blurring is intentionally added to keep the focus on the subject.
@Mikal ahhh yeah I have tried using tiltshift blur and such for the effect, but doing it in post always looks fake. TBH a lot of times it looks fake, but because of the folliage variation in this one it keeps the realistic look which is why I figured this one was achieved on-camera. I'm mostly a fan of on-camera effects. Same sort of thing I try to do for some dog photography, but theyre so large keeping even the entire head in focus is rough it feels like! hence feeling like there is a trick I am missing. I think the length helps...my longest nice prime is a 100mm, a 200 or 300 would I think achieve the effect better.
I get images like your first one a lot, but ones like the second are much harder! But I like :) :D
With something like that, shooting with a slightly longer lens completely wide open, with the subject a little closer will help. If I really want to isolate focus, and I can use a short telephone photo, I have an 85 mm f1.2 that has an extremely, at times almost unusably shallow depth of field if the subject is somewhat close up.
My camera shoots fascists
Sunguramy 